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I currently am being tasked to cross-reference ENVSTAT data with IPMITOOL data. I managed to get envstat working well without too much pain, but I have been stuck at configuring iPMITOOL for quite awhile now.

As far as I am aware, the only way to use IPMITOOL is using a valid IP. This shouldn't be a problem, as I could just direct it to either the computers main address or just '127.0.0.1'. I do the following command:

ipmitool -I lanplus -H 127.0.0.1 -U root -P <password> chassis status

as well as

ipmitool -I lanplus -H <IP_ADDRESS> -U root -P <password> chassis status

on two different computers which result in the same output:

Error: UNable to establish IPMI v2 / RMCP+ session
Error: sending Chassis Status command

I am working on a Mac station with NetBSD on a local VM.

My question is twofold:

  1. Can you use ipmitool to gather local data?

  2. How do you configure ipmitool and/or the OS to accept ipmitool commands?

Lafferty
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3 Answers3

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NetBSD does not support direct access to any IPMI controller (BMC) that might be installed in the underlying hardware system (i.e. there is no OpenIPMI driver interface currently available in NetBSD). The NetBSD kernel does not support the IPMI-over-LAN protocol directly either.

So, no, ipmitool cannot be used to gather "local" system data on NetBSD. Except....

The ipmitool "lan" and "lanplus" interfaces expect to talk to a remote access device that interfaces to the target systems's BMC and speaks the IPMI-over-LAN protocol. An example of such a device is the Dell Remote Access Controller (DRAC). That device will have its own IP address, and usually also has its own network interface plug that also needs to be connected to your LAN, and of course it will also need to be assigned its own unique IP address (distinct from the IP address assigned to the OS running on the main system).

So, ipmitool can in some situations collect local data on NetBSD, e.g. if it is run on a host system that has a remote access device installed within itself which speaks IPMI-over-LAN, and if the NetBSD host can ping that device.

Of course a virtual machine is not likely to have an IPMI controller in the first place, not even a simulated one.

Greg A. Woods
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You can use a driver to access IPMI or your BMC chip in your local machine. If you're using RedHat or Centos, try "yum install OpenIPMI", then you should able to use "ipmitool chassis status" or other ipmitool commands.

kli
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Here on FreeBSD running on actual hardware (PowerEdge 2900), I can simply type:

% ipmitool chassis status

and get the report. I think, talking to local hardware (through the /dev/ipmi0) is the default -- unless you specify a remote address. I'm sure, things must be similar on NetBSD. Even if the device-name is different, the executable should know it.

However, my other FreeBSD installation, which is inside a VM on a Mac (hosted by VirtualBox) does not detect ipmi-hardware. So, it may be, that it is not made available by the hypervisor software.

Hope, this helps...

Mikhail T.
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